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Short abstract:

This presentation investigates how creativity began to be associated with science in memoirs by physicists and chemists from the 1960s onward, transforming concepts of knowledge making and scientific ability both within science education and in scientific popular outreach.

Long abstract:

Today, we take "creativity" for granted: that anyone can create new and useful things, and that we always need more of it. But this concept has a history, intimately related to American postwar concerns about technoscientific conformity, boredom and destructiveness.

This presentation focuses on how the concepts of “science” and “creativity” were deployed in memoirs by chemists and physicists 1960–1990. It aims to explain a shift in meta-stories about science: why did many scientists’ life narratives change from trying to evoke awe to depicting creativity in the 1960s? Because creativity provided a means to defuse much countercultural critique against science in the 1960s, presenting it as fun, playful and mildly rebellious.

This is the story of the concept's fluidity, its ability to stretch and dismantle binaries. The presentation will also reveal "creativity"'s hidden roots in organizational theory and management discourse. While historians agree that ”creativity” has transformed ideas about knowledge making, we still know little about how, why and with what effects it came to assume its prominent place in our current epistemic culture.

Memoirs by scientists are often quoted in science outreach, such as at museums and websites, and within science education. Analyzing these self-presentations by scientists thus provides a fresh angle on how science education, technoscience and society are mutually constituted.